A mobile stage can be generally defined as a transportable construction to be assembled and disassembled at designated locations, generally outdoors, so as to provide a place where people such as musicians, actors, entertainers, politicians and spokespersons, to name just a few, can appear in front of a live audience. A mobile stage has a framework that generally includes an overhead roof structure supported by column structures and an elevated floor structure. The roof structure can provide a support for scenic equipment such as lights, wide screens, speakers and others, depending on the nature of the event and the venue.
Different arrangements have been suggested over the years in an attempt to simplify the handling of mobile stages as well as to minimize time and labor costs associated with assembling and disassembling them, especially when the mobile stages are only required for a relatively brief period of time at the same location and must be continuously relocated from one site to another. This resulted in a number of arrangements involving foldable frameworks integrated on a chassis that can be hauled by a truck tractor or by another vehicle. Many of these mobile stages are designed to reduce time and labor costs compared to arrangements that require a very large number of small individual parts to be transported and assembled on-site. Examples of mobile stages include U.S. Pat. No. 4,026,076 (Analetto) published on 31 May 1977, U.S. Pat. No. 5,947,502 (Kammerzell et al.) published on 7 Sep. 1999, EP-1754845 A1 (Sada Casabon) published on 21 Feb. 2007, and EP-2277739 A1 (Laorden Gomez et al.) published on 26 Jan. 2011, to name just a few.
One of the challenges in the design of a mobile stage is the ability of transporting it easily in a folded configuration, particularly on roads. A mobile stage constructed on a semitrailer chassis to be hauled by a truck tractor must comply with various requirements associated with transporting a load on roads, such as the overall dimensions, the maximum weight per axle, etc. Oversized and/or overweight semitrailers can still be permitted on some roads under certain conditions. However, having a mobile stage on an oversized and/or overweight semitrailer is generally undesirable since this complicates the transportation process and can significantly increase the transportation costs, especially if the mobile stage must be frequently relocated from one site to another. Very large mobile stages are often used, for instance, by popular rock bands for worldwide concert tours. Having an oversized and/or overweight load in such context can create undesirable complications. Thus, transport-related factors can create many challenges in the design and the handling of some mobile stages when using existing approaches, particularly for mobile stages having a framework that is relatively large in size.
Accordingly, there is still room for many improvements in this area of technology.